... The odd couple: Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli and mystic numbers.
Compare this with what Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor say in Naming Infinity:
Back to the TLS review:
But why would a more rational explanation be necessarily more sound?
Jung ... attributed Pauli's fragile state to his over-reliance on rational thought at the expense of feeling.
[Pauli] wholeheartedly accepted the more controversial aspects of Jung’s theoretical framework, which struck a chord with his own long-standing interest in the mystical significance of particular numbers. Why did his exclusion principle demand that each electron be described by four quantum numbers, and not three as he had previously believed? What was the significance of the number 137, which appears in nature as the fine structure constant that determines the degree of splitting of spectral lines?
Compare this with what Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor say in Naming Infinity:
It is not necessary to resolve the ultimate problems in the philosophy of mathematics in order to see that Name Worshipping - a religious viewpoint regarded as heresy by the Russian Orthodox Church and condemned by the Communist Party as a reactionary cult - influenced the emergence of a new movement in modern mathematics. In contrast to the French leaders in set theory, the Russians were much bolder in embracing such concepts as non-denumerable transfinite numbers. While the French were constrained by their rationalism, the Russians were energized by their mystical faith. Just as the Russian Name Worshippers could "name God," they could also "name infinities," and they saw a strong analogy in the ways in which both operations were accomplished. A comparison of the predominant French and Russian attitudes toward set theory illustrates an interesting aspect of science: if science becomes too cut-and-dried, too rationalistic, this can slow down its adherents, impeding imaginative leaps.
Back to the TLS review:
Pauli was intrigued to find, on consulting a scholar of Jewish mysticism, that the word Kabbalah, written as numbers in Hebrew, adds up to 137. Miller agrees that this is “an extraordinary link between mysticism and physics”. Neither does he question Jung’s accounts of Pauli’s dreams: a more rational explanation of the images that successively appear in them might be that Pauli’s increasing preoccupation with Jung’s theories while waking caused him to rehearse versions of them in his sleep.
But why would a more rational explanation be necessarily more sound?
This reminds me of an old Arthur C. Clarke story, The Nine Billion Names of God...
ReplyDelete“It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We have reason to believe," continued the lama imperturbably, "that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised."
"And you have been doing this for three centuries?"
"Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task."
"Oh," Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. "Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?"
The lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.
"Call it ritual, if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being_God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on_they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all."
...
and (sorry Frank, for multiple posts), Pauli himself was famous for something called the Pauli effect.
ReplyDeleteIf he walked even near a lab (he was a theorist not an experimentalist) the experiment tanked...
from wikipedia:
The Pauli effect, if it were real, would be classified as a "macro-psychokinetic" phenomenon. Wolfgang Pauli, however, was (according to his biographer Enz) convinced that the effect named after him was real — Markus Fierz, a close colleague, says "Pauli himself thoroughly believed in his effect". As Pauli considered parapsychology as worth serious investigation, this would fit with his scientific thinking. In February 1950, when he was at Princeton University, the cyclotron burnt, and he asked himself if this mischief belonged to such a Pauli effect, named after him.
The Pauli effect at the foundation of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zürich 1948, caused Pauli to write his article "Background-Physics", in which he tries to find complementary relationships between physics and depth psychology.